The revealing questions no one is asking about single life

I came across this single life article when I googled misogynist as a friend told me she thought FH was one and I wanted to check out in detail if I felt she had a point! It’s on the website Psychology Today. It hit me powerfully, in a positive way, not surprisingly in view of what I have written on my site about my VSO experiences alone and my current ‘Letters to Saul’ blog strand covering a period post my marriage break up. In some ways what is equally interesting are the comments that come afterwards that get quite vituperative and a bit off point in terms of my own thinking.

The question I asked myself on reading it was, ‘Hazel, do you truly acknowledge the positives that being single has been for you?’ Of course I haven’t, but they are there.

Good old Bella …..

Bella DePaulo Ph.D. Living Single
The Revealing Questions No One Is Asking About Single Life
The questions that might completely change your view of single life
Posted Jul 14, 2016
Stereotypes can be sticky things. There are now well over 100 million people in the U.S. who are not married – close to half of all adults 18 and older. Just by our numbers alone, we should be able to dispel all those notions that our lives are somehow second rate. But that hasn’t quite happened.
There are lots of reasons why negative perceptions persist, even when they are wrong. Part of the blame falls on the laps of people who do research. They have been preoccupied with studying married people – almost always with the assumption that getting married makes people better off in all sorts of ways. (It doesn’t, except financially, and that’s because of the unfair economic benefits people receive simply because they are married.) With their marital mindsets, researchers miss out on the kinds of experiences that can make single life so meaningful and so satisfying.
Here are just a few of the questions that have only rarely been posed in research studies. Some of these questions have never been asked at all, so far as I know. If we did have answers to these questions, I think we might have a very different view of single life than we do now.
• To what extent have you been able to make the life choices that you find most fulfilling and most meaningful?
• To what extent are you pursuing your interests and your passions? To what extent are you doing so guiltlessly?
• To what extent can you save or spend your money as you see fit?
• How close are you to getting the amount of solitude that you desire?
• How close are you to getting the mix of time alone and time together that you consider ideal for you?
• How meaningful is your work? (A longitudinal study suggests that single people value meaningful work more than married people do.)
• To what extent do you have a sense of self-determination? (The scant research that is available shows that single people fare better than married people on autonomy.)
• To what extent do you have “a sense of continued growth and development as a person”? (The one relevant study shows that single people fare better than married people on personal growth.)